Top ten girl geeks

Photographed numerous times clutching her PSP, and famous for having her Sidekick hacked, Hilton is, in her socialite heart, a geek. Hilton attended the gamer's Mecca, E3, and even stars in her own mobile game, Diamond Quest. Hilton is continually fraternising with fellow geeks in her show The Simple Life, where she often befriends nerdy boys still living with their parents. Hilton popularised the pink Motorola V3 phone and has starred in one of the most downloaded Internet videos of all time. She might look trendy on the outside, but inside this girl is all binary.

Krotoski is widely respected as one of the top girl geek writers. Currently writing reviews for the Guardian and working as a presenter for the BBC, she is an expert in the social psychology of virtual worlds. Krotoski has always been a staunch supporter of girls in gaming, and is said to be working on a white paper titled 'Women in Games'.

An expert in radioactivity (though not its long-term consequences), Curie used to walk around with her pockets stuffed full of test tubes containing radioactive isotopes. She worked in her shed with some of the most dangerous substances known to humanity, and is the only person to have won a Nobel Prize in two different scientific disciplines. She discovered the elements radium and polonium, but so that others could share in her discovery, she did not patent the process she used to isolate the radium element. She died in 1934 due to massive radiation exposure.